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| Task: | Buccleuch Place-specific legacy system issues |
| Group: | john, roger, iain |
| Stage: | 1 |
Note: this document is still in the draft stage
Folk at Buccleuch Place make a lot of use of the cm and dtcm calendar applications, which use files in a particular (proprietary?) format. This functionality has to be available on DICE machines, and so a method of transferring (or converting) these files to a Linux application has to be found. There appear to be three calendar applications under Linux: ical, Gnome Calendar (gnomecal), and KOrganizer (korganizer) - but none seem to be suitable for shared access or cm-compatibility.
Computing staff at Buccleuch Place also support Sun machines belonging to the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), and these machines currently share corpora and local binaries (served from a .cogsci host). These services will need to be preserved when there is no longer any need for the Sun servers within Informatics at Buccleuch Place (unless, of course, CSTR has decided to move away from Suns before then). Support for CSTR Suns will obviously persist while the .cogsci Sun servers remain in use within Informatics.
It has recently been agreed that CSTR's Suns will be replaced with lcfg-configured Linux boxes.
Some currently-used applications may have no similar or functionally equivalent Linux version. We may find that it is not possible to port a version of all Sun applications to Linux, or may decide not to provide a particular software package. Do we wean users off such applications on current systems so that the move to DICE machines is less traumatic? For example, Word-compatible applications such as Star Office may not be provided under Linux (although a version is available).
If there is an amalgamation of a user's home directories to conform with DICE requirements, must the original view of the home directory on legacy machines be maintained? (This might require an adjustment of the home directory location field in the passwd maps, or equivalent).
Setting up a /legacy structure to mirror that available under DICE is reliant on a particular DICE structure being agreed. The setup of such a structure needs to be a co-operative venture across all sites - to co-ordinate NFS exports, and create automount maps and mount points.
Sun servers will continue to require information from DNS, and NIS+ maps. At some point, the master repository for these services will move to one or more DICE machines - but until then, these services need to be supported on legacy machines. Is any heed to be paid to the existence of the DICE world in the interim? Given the adoption of "Model C" (see User account transitional arrangements), is there any intention of feeding information down from the DICE world to be used in the re-building of maps, etc? Or does the DICE world not acknowledge the existence of the legacy world?
Because there will be no AppleTalk in the DICE world, alternative methods of printing will need to be found for Macs in BP (see the Printing task report).
Additional space needs to be found in the BP machine room to accommodate extra DICE equipment (Kerberos/LDAP server, switches, routers, etc) to be permanently or temporarily based here. It is assumed these will be Suns in the first instance, possibly migrating to Linux boxes later.
It is hoped that all networking equipment will be in the comms rack (avoiding having network boxes sitting on the server/disk racks).
In addition, Buccleuch Place will need to continue with some non-DICE equipment in order to support non-Informatics machines within CSTR (but this will change shortly - see above). Additionally, DICE equipment will need to be allocated space in the BP machine room.
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